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Live USB Crashes, over and over again

The title only describes what generally happens, there are other things happening that I can't quite understand. I'll start off with my system specs; I am running an Acer Aspire 1410 netbook, 2GB of ram, 130 GB HD, 3 USB 2.0 ports and I think that is all that might be relevant to my system. It normally runs Windows 7 on it and I have been live booting from a USB to run BT5R3. I use a 16GB Scandisk to boot (and have been using Katana on a PNY 16gig to boot to Backtrack 4 recently).

Initially I was encountering a problem where Backtrack wouldn't shut down properly, and so I would have to do a forced shutdown. After this Backtrack wouldn't boot properly. So I have formatted the USB a few times and reinstalled, but kept getting faced with the same problem. After a while I started getting general USB failure. Even in Windows 7 I would have a problem with the USBs, they aren't recognized and nothing I seem to do makes them recognized. This problem in Windows 7 isn't just with the BT USB either, once it is not recognizing one USB it wont recognize them across the board, any other device like my External HDD. After a some strange mixture of reboots, or something else that I can't really explain I can finally get my computer to recognize the devices.
So this inability to recognize devices is just one part of the problems. I am also getting strange crackling noises coming out of my computer when I have a device in, in Windows and running a BT distro. Since BT5 hasn't been working I have been using Katana and booting BT4 from there because even after a crash it will run again. So in BT4 it will run fine for a while, and then after a bit I will start hearing crackling noises and this generally means my S is F'd. Once the noises kick in BT will start "eating" programs. The programs I am running will still run okay, but anything else I try to run will fail. When I try running certain commands I generally get I/O errors, I can't run Halt for example (which makes shutting down suck). After forced shutdown I can usually run BT4 again with no problems on booting, but all my problems just start over again.
So I feel like this explains pretty much most of the problems I have been having. If you need more info please ask, I was trying to be thorough but this is my first time posting on technical forms like this so I can't be 100% sure.
It should probably also be mentioned that I run into similar problems even when I run an Ubuntu live USB too.
I have searched the FAQ, wiki, forum, and even the internet but to no avail. So this is kinda my last resort (just in case you were thinking I haven't tried to find other solutions). Thanks for your help!